John Lamb, you can’t expect someone to grasp such an idea who basically sees the natural world as a giant atomistic mechanism, and the human being in like manner, with a “soul” and some transcendent intelligence tacked on for good measure to “explain” the gaps and process some bare minimal of “the Faith”. There can be no intrinsic connection between subjective moral choices and the nature of objective reality in such a world except as banal physical consequentialism or God deciding to enact punishment (if it even allows for miracles).

I would draw your attention to how it is none other than Satan, no less than “the god of this world” according to our Lord, who by tradition cannot create anything by fiat but can only take what God has made and change and pervert it.

Think about that while you mull over the idea of a being who works his acts of creation through the dog-eat-dog game of suffering and death called “the evolution of species”.

The evolution versus creation debate is moot to me, not because of the intellectual pretense of being able reconstruct “natural history” supposedly spanning billions of years, but because there is no reason to just assume that the world created in Genesis 1 is the world in which man now lives. Evolution may well be true, Darwinian or theistic, but if it is, then the being behind it is, unlike the creator of Genesis 1, a monster who created an abomination, a devil who deserves not our worship but our spit in his face.

My statement to theistic evolutionist “Christians” is the same one I make to Muslims and Calvinists: your “God” is the devil, and even if he were the supreme being, I would on principle refuse to serve him.

It’s also interesting that the “God” of Lurianic Kabbalah, so popular in modern “Judaism” and identical with the Masonic “Grand Architect”, went through several failed worlds in his creative process before arriving at this one. Just food for thought.

The Protestant God demands blood to assuage his wrath and pours out his punishment upon Jesus Christ; the Jesus Christ of the first thousand years of Catholic redemptive theology invades this accursed world, conquers its powers and principalities, and takes us from it by force like Moses the Israelites from Egypt, ransoming is with His blood, like the Passover lamb, from the clutches of Satan. Christus victor. Amen.

John Lamb, you can’t expect someone to grasp such an idea who basically sees the natural world as a giant atomistic mechanism, and the human being in like manner, with a “soul” and some transcendent intelligence tacked on for good measure to “explain” the gaps and process some bare minimal of “the Faith”. There can be no intrinsic connection between subjective moral choices and the nature of objective reality in such a world except as banal physical consequentialism or God deciding to enact punishment (if it even allows for miracles).

Absolutely, but hopefully that mechanistic (Newtonian) picture of the universe is slowly going out of fashion. With the confusion of our times, the intuitive sense that people have of (if you like) the 'ensoulment' of the world, and there being a connection between the human spirit and the world at large (the interior and the exterior worlds) often ends up producing New Age or environmentalist beliefs. But at least materialism is being undermined and the soil is more fertile for when the Church is ready to go sowing again. Also, quantum physics has (as far as I know) cast doubt on the coherence of the mechanistic cosmology. What people need to know about mathematical physics (and the material sciences in general) is that they are getting hold of a part of reality, but it is only like its outer mesh or exo-skeleton. This kind of materialist tends to truly believe that the highest knowledge we can have of the world is that which can be expressed in a mathematical formula.

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The evolution versus creation debate is moot to me, not because of the intellectual pretense of being able reconstruct “natural history” supposedly spanning billions of years, but because there is no reason to just assume that the world created in Genesis 1 is the world in which man now lives.

Yes, one of the appeals of the evolutionary account of the universe is that it seems to accord with the cyclical picture of nature as a cycle of life & death, the four seasons, the cycle of the planets & stars, etc. But to assume that this is the eternal state of the universe is just a lack of imagination. We don't really (outside of revelation) know what the world was like before. However, the ancient world is filled with descriptions of a primeval "golden age" where everything prospered effortlessly and there was no disaster or strife. One of the defining characteristics of the "modern" age is that such traditions are given no intellectual consideration or respect as they were in all past ages.

Quote from: Plato

. . . And on one occasion, when he wished to draw them on to discourse on ancient history, he attempted to tell them the most ancient of our traditions, concerning Phoroneus, who was said to be the first man, and Niobe; and he went on to tell the legend about Deucalion and Pyrrha after the Flood, and how they survived it, and to give the geneology of their descendants; and by recounting the number of years occupied by the events mentioned he tried to calculate the periods of time. Whereupon one of the priests, a prodigiously old man, said, “O Solon, Solon, you Greeks are always children: there is not such a thing as an old Greek.” And on hearing this he asked, “What mean you by this saying?” And the priest replied, “You are young in soul, every one of you. For therein you possess not a single belief that is ancient and derived from old tradition, nor yet one science that is hoary with age . . ."

« Last Edit: August 07, 2018, 06:02:40 AM by John Lamb »

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As many as received him, he gave them power to be made the sons of God, to them that believe in his name. (John 1:12)

This reminds me of what Charles Coulombe has said about occultists and the like and conversion. They have no problem believing in the Eucharist and divine miracles. Once you have witnessed for yourself the super natural - or at least preternatural - and observed that reality is not what scientific materialism purports it to be at its foundation, no atheism or crypto-physicalism is going to convince one otherwise, especially when the only counter-argument to such experiences is the claim of “hallucination” and “it’s all in your mind” based in the mere assumption of what constitutes “objective reality” and its real ontological distinction from the phenomena which “merely” appear to the subject - an “objective reality” to which there is no epistemological access but through these same “mere” appearances, ala catch-22. It’s “all in the mind”, which is an “epiphenomenon of the brain”, which is itself an hypothesised physical object “out there” we have access to only as an object of experience, i.e., the brain itself is by these very standards “all in the mind”. You can’t make this stuff up, unless you’re a scientific materialist, absolute or relative.

If it (whatever phenomenon) cannot be manipulated and "verified" by the currently available standard of scientific investigation -- a standard which in itself is subjective, being based on professional consensus -- then the phenomenon doesn't actually exist but is a product of imagination and psychological projection.

That's fine, just be sure to challenge such "pure" scientists next time they insist that their spouses, children, parents, and friends truly love them. Sorry, no proof. Better be skeptical about every relationship, every sentiment, every "certain" identity: they could all be pathetic guesses. A large portion of every day we spend performing activities based on guesses, trust, and faith. But it's perfectly rational to count on that which is merely statistically probable yet unproven, yet irrational to conclude that creation did not create itself.

Yes, Miriam, St. Albert the Great was as great a scientist as he was a theologian, and he always placed the Book of Nature immediately after and beside the Book of Scripture. "His writings are remarkable for their exact scientific knowledge, and for that reason he has been made the patron saint of scientists. Thought for the Day: St. Albert the Great was convinced that all creation spoke of God and that the tiniest piece of scientific knowledge told us something about Him. Besides the Bible, God has given us the book of creation revealing something of His wisdom and power. In creation, Albert saw the hand of God." http://www.ewtn.com/library/mary/albert.htm St. Albert also made the prophesy that the teaching of St. Thomas, his student, would one day resound in the great universities of Catholic Europe and around the world. He is regarded by many as the equal of St. Thomas.

Beside, the Book of Nature is the only guide a pagan has, and it should be sufficient to show him God is Power and Wisdom itself, just as natural conscience and his innate knowledge of good and evil, and impulse to choose the good, should show him God is Love and Goodness itself. Nature prepares the way for Grace. The wonders of God in the spiritual order are infinitely more beautiful and amazing than His admittedly amazing wonders even in the visible natural world. Think how beautiful the soul must be, St. Theresa who saw it described it as a glorious Castle. And yet a mortal sin is like a nuclear weapon on that castle. It is not only original sin, which caused a dramatic fall both of man and all visible creation, but also the billions of daily mortal sins, that have hidden effects on both the material and spiritual universe. But nevertheless, the world and all creation will be restored and raised high even beyond its original dignity after the final resurrection of the body, and in heaven we will see all these things perfectly just as they are in the light of God. In the meanwhile, it is our duty to overcome all evil, and put mortal sin to an end in our lives.

Quote from: Pon De Replay

I don't deny the impressive complexity of the molecular system. But I'm not sure I'd ascribe a high intelligence, necessarily, to a complex system. It doesn't appear evident that this intelligence is designing organisms so much as it is manufacturing them according to the genome. It seems to be, as James suggests, reading the code and following instructions.

Not at all, dear Pon, not at all. That is another mistake of theistic evolution. God is not "reading the code and following instructions", and I don't think James suggested that. God designed the code and the universe that is governed by His laws are following His instructions. Let me ask you, Pon, what do you believe about God? Do you believe He daily creates the souls of every new person, that He governs the universe actively by His laws, that He ever impels us to do good at least by natural conscience, if not the supernatural grace of His Spirit, and that He, being Infinite Power, can create beings out of nothing, simply by willing them into existence? Genesis opens with Fiat Lux (1:3), and Light was made. And so it was with all things. "3And God said: Be light made. And light was made."

After His original spontaneous creation, He established the natural laws of the universe and since then governs all creatures by these means. He created the first pair of each species, and gave them all the power to reproduce according to their kind. In Christian Europe, Latin was as much the lingua franca of theology as it was of science. Already in Genesis, God taught the species reproduces according to its kind ("species" in Latin, see for e.g. Gen 1:21 in the Vulgate) As a programmed algorithm is governed by the laws of its programming, the universe obeys the laws imposed on it by the Designer. St. Thomas states, "The fifth way is taken from the governance of the world. We see that things which lack intelligence, such as natural bodies, act for an end, and this is evident from their acting always, or nearly always, in the same way, so as to obtain the best result. Hence it is plain that not fortuitously, but designedly, do they achieve their end. Now whatever lacks intelligence cannot move towards an end, unless it be directed by some being endowed with knowledge and intelligence; as the arrow is shot to its mark by the archer. Therefore some intelligent being exists by whom all natural things are directed to their end; and this being we call God." God governs all natural things by His laws, and laws are always indications of some guiding Intelligence. But God doesn't need to "follow instructions", His creation follows HIS instructions. We were discussing whales, He made them and gave them power to reproduce after their kind. The fossil record supports special creation.

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Although the process is impressively complex, the end result is not always impressive.

The answer to these things, beside what others have already said, is that this world is not our eternal destiny and it's a great mistake to treat it as if it were. What would it profit anyone if they had all natural blessings but lost their soul? It profits not, the Lord reminds us, to gain the whole world but lose our souls. Our souls are infinitely precious in the sight of God. The body and the visible wonders of creation are only there to lead to the knowledge of God and the soul, and of the afterlife we must all begin to prepare and make provision for, if we love our own self, as God our Father loves all of us. This world is meant to be the stepping stone to our eternal afterlife in heaven with God; yet all visible things will be restored on the last day, after the final resurrection. The world as it currently is has been defaced by the darkness of sin. Yet, in spite of it all, the hand of God is evident. The evidence presented by Dr. Meyer, that drawn from chirality, and those mentioned by others in this thread, should be compelling for us all.

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Mary, our Heavenly Mother, implores those who receive Holy Communion Daily, or at least Weekly, to Offer their Lives. TEXT OF THE LIFE OFFERING, adapted and pluralized: Dear Lord Jesus, before the Holy Trinity, Our Heavenly Mother, and the whole Heavenly Court, united with Your most Precious Blood and Your Sacrifice on Calvary, We hereby Offer our whole Lives to the Intention of Your Sacred Heart and to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. Together with our life, we place at Your disposal all Holy Masses, all our Holy Communions, all Rosaries, all acts of consecration, all our good deeds, all our sacrifices, and the suffering of our entire life for the Adoration and Supplication of the Holy Trinity, for Unity in our Holy Mother Church, for the Holy Father, Pope Francis the First; and for His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI. For all the Cardinals of the Holy Roman Church, for all Bishops of the Universal Church that they may be true Apostles and Shepherds; and for Priests, Nuns and Monks, for good Priestly and Religious Vocations, and for All Souls until the end of the world. O my Jesus, please accept our life Sacrifice and our offerings and give us Your grace that we may all persevere obediently until death. Amen." https://marianapostolate.com/life-offering/ It is recommended that you make this Life Offering as soon as you feel ready, and to renew it from time to time. Please do.

Please read the Blessed Mother's amazing promises in the link: A simple effective way for thousands of us to save millions of souls. The Doctors and Apostles say if we save even just one other soul through prayer and sacrifice, we also ensure the salvation of our own. Let us all Offer all our Life to Jesus and Mary Today.

St. Albert the Great was convinced that all creation spoke of God and that the tiniest piece of scientific knowledge told us something about Him. Besides the Bible, God has given us the book of creation revealing something of His wisdom and power. In creation, Albert saw the hand of God."

I'm sure this is why I'm so impatient with those who worship science and consider nature, laughably, a separate force -- as if nature is apart from God.

A few years ago I was watching some nature program on TV, very briefly, and I had the pleasure of watching some great nature photographer focus up-close on an owl. I have seen other large birds IRL (tropical ones), up-close -- very, very close -- my face within an inch or two of their beaks-- and I have had the same reaction to those moments as I had during that moment: How is it even possible NOT to believe in God when you look at even one member of a species, not to mention several within the same family? I could not take my eyes off the owl -- that stunning creature of magnificent intricacy and beauty, the utter harmony of color. Had I not already had infused faith, I would say that that would have been a conversion moment for me. Something of the very purity of God, and certainly the unity that is God, leapt out at me.

Creation Scientist Dr. Walter Brown has an extraordinary list of documented evolutionist hoaxes that go far beyond "Piltdown man". The chapter on fossil record disproofs of evolution is also worth reading separately. 26. Ape-Men?For over a century, studies of skulls and teeth have produced unreliable conclusions about man’s origin.a Also, fossil evidence allegedly supporting human evolution is fragmentary and open to other interpretations. Fossil evidence showing the evolution of chimpanzees, supposedly the closest living relative to humans, is nonexistent.b

Stories claiming that fossils of primitive, apelike men have been found are overstated.c

Since 1953, it has been universally acknowledged that Piltdown “man” was a hoax, yet Piltdown “man” was in textbooks for more than 40 years.dBefore 1977, evidence for Ramapithecus was a mere handful of teeth and jaw fragments. We now know these fragments were pieced together incorrectly by Louis Leakeye and others into a form resembling part of the human jaw.f Ramapithecus was just an ape.g [See Figure 11.]The only remains of Nebraska “man” turned out to be a single toothh—of a pig. [See Figure 12.]Forty years after he discovered Java “man,” Eugene Dubois conceded that it was not a man, but was similar to a large gibbon (an ape). In citing evidence to support this new conclusion, Dubois admitted that he had withheld parts of four other thigh bones of apes found in the same area.iMany experts consider the skulls of Peking “man” to be the remains of apes that were systematically decapitated and exploited for food by true man.j Its classification, Homo erectus, is considered by most experts to be a category that should never have been created.kHeidelberg man (Homo heidelbergensis), supposedly our ancestor, was based on one lower jaw. Many researchers now feel the species should be eliminated.lThe first confirmed limb bones of Homo habilis were discovered in 1986. They showed that this animal clearly had apelike proportionsm and should never have been classified as manlike (Homo).n

The australopithecines, made famous by Louis and Mary Leakey, are quite distinct from humans. Several detailed computer studies of australopithecines have shown that their bodily proportions were not intermediate between those of man and living apes.o Another study showed that their inner ear bones, used to maintain balance, were strikingly similar to those of chimpanzees and gorillas, but differed greatly from those of humans.p Also, their pattern of dental development corresponds to chimpanzees, not humans.q Claims were made—based on one partially complete australopithecine fossil, Australopithecus afarensis (a 3.5-foot-tall, long-armed, 60-pound adult called Lucy)—that all australopithecines walked upright in a human manner. However, studies of Lucy’s entire anatomy, not just a knee joint, now show that this is very unlikely. She likely swung from the treesr and was similar to pygmy chimpanzees.s In 2006, a partial Australopithecus afarensis specimen—a 3-year-old baby—with clear apelike features—was announced.t The australopithecines are probably extinct apes.u

For about 100 years, the world was led to believe that Neanderthal man was stooped and apelike. This false idea was based upon some Neanderthals with bone diseases, such as arthritis and rickets.v Recent dental and x-ray studies of Neanderthals suggest that they were humans who matured at a slower rate and lived to be much older than people today.w Neanderthal man, Heidelberg man, and Cro-Magnon man are now considered completely human. Artists’ drawings of “ape-men,” especially their fleshy portions, are often quite imaginative and are not supported by the evidence.x ...

Figure 12: Nebraska Man. Artists’ drawings, even those based on speculation, powerfully influence the public. Nebraska man was mistakenly based on one tooth of an extinct pig. Yet in 1922, The Illustrated London News published this picture showing our supposed ancestors. Of course, it is highly unlikely that any fossil evidence could support the image conveyed here of a naked man carrying a club.

Where is the evolutionist reckoning with truth and justice for having invented these fables and just-so stories? Where is the praise so richly deserved for Creation Scientists - who alone against the whole world - had the courage of conviction to stand against these unscientific falsehoods and were proven right time and time again? http://www.creationscience.com/onlinebook/LifeSciences30.html

u In 1995, nine anthropologists announced their discovery of early representatives of Homo habilis and Homo ergaster in China. [See Huang Wanpo et al., “Early Homo and Associated Artifacts from Asia,” Nature, Vol. 378, 16 November 1995, pp. 275–278.] Fourteen years later the same journal published a retraction. The discovery was of a “mystery ape.” [See Russell L. Ciochon, “The Mystery Ape of Pleistocene Asia,” Nature, Vol. 459, 18 June 2009, pp. 910–911.]

How many more mystery apes are there, and do they explain other so-called “ape-men”?

u “We have all seen the canonical parade of apes, each one becoming more human. We know that as a depiction of evolution, this line-up is tosh [tidy, but sheer nonsense]. Yet we cling to it. Ideas of what human evolution ought to have been like still colour our debates. ... almost every time someone claims to have found a new species of hominin, someone else refutes it. The species is said to be either a member of Homo sapiens, but pathological, or an ape.” Henry Gee, “Craniums with Clout,” Nature, Vol. 478, 6 October 2011, p. 34.

b . “Fossil evidence of human evolutionary history is fragmentary and open to various interpretations. Fossil evidence of chimpanzee evolution is absent altogether.” Henry Gee, “Return to the Planet of the Apes,” Nature, Vol. 412, 12 July 2001, p. 131.

c . Lord Zuckerman candidly stated that if special creation did not occur, then no scientist could deny that man evolved from some apelike creature “without leaving any fossil traces of the steps of the transformation.” Solly Zuckerman (former Chief Scientific Advisor to the British Government and Honorary Secretary of the Zoological Society of London), Beyond the Ivory Tower (New York: Taplinger Publishing Co., 1970), p. 64

How is it that trained men, the greatest experts of their day, could look at a set of modern human bones—the cranial fragments—and “see” a clear simian signature in them; and “see” in an ape’s jaw the unmistakable signs of humanity? The answers, inevitably, have to do with the scientists’ expectations and their effects on the interpretation of data. Lewin, Bones of Contention, p. 61 ...

g . Hammond, p. 43.

u “The dethroning of Ramapithecus—from putative [supposed] first human in 1961 to extinct relative of the orangutan in 1982—is one of the most fascinating, and bitter, sagas in the search for human origins.” Lewin, Bones of Contention, p. 86.

h . “A single small water-worn tooth, 10.5 mm by 11 mm in crown diameter, signalizes the arrival of a member of the family of anthropoid Primates in North America in Middle Pliocene time.” Henry Fairfield Osborn, “Hesperopithecus, the First Anthropoid Primate Found in America,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, Vol. 8, 15 August 1922, p. 245.

i . Java man consisted of two bones found about 39 feet apart: a skull cap and femur (thighbone). Rudolf Virchow, the famous German pathologist, believed that the femur was from a gibbon. By concurring, Dubois supported his own non-Darwinian theory of evolution—a theory too complex and strange to discuss here.

Whether the bones were from a large-brained gibbon, a hominid, another animal, or two completely different animals is not the only issue. This episode shows how easily the person, who knew the bones best, could shift his interpretation from Java “man” to Java “gibbon.” When evidence is so fragmentary, many interpretations are possible.

u “Pithecanthropus [Java man] was not a man, but a gigantic genus allied to the Gibbons, superior to its near relatives on account of its exceedingly large brain volume, and distinguished at the same time by its erect attitude.” Eugene Dubois, “On the Fossil Human Skulls Recently Discovered in Java and Pithecanthropus Erectus,” Man, Vol. 37, January 1937, p. 4.

“Thus the evidence given by those five new thigh bones of the morphological and functional distinctness of Pithecanthropus erectus furnishes proof, at the same time, of its close affinity with the gibbon group of anthropoid apes.” Ibid., p. 5.

u “The success of Darwinism was accompanied by a decline in scientific integrity ... A striking example, which has only recently come to light, is the alteration of the Piltdown skull so that it could be used as evidence for the descent of man from the apes; but even before this a similar instance of tinkering with evidence was finally revealed by the discoverer of Pithecanthropus [Java man], who admitted, many years after his sensational report, that he had found in the same deposits bones that are definitely human.” W. R. Thompson, p. 17.

Is it only a coincidence that so many of these hoaxes were from pigs and apes? Dr. Brown seems to incline to the mild view, but I don't think the malice angle of deliberate hoaxes by some (especially in light of propaganda in British newspapers) can be ruled out.

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Please listen to the frequent messages and take heed of the directions given from Our Living Lord and Our Loving Lady from around the world here: https://maryrefugeofholylove.com/ Great things are at stake. Please consecrate your life to the Blessed Mother so that the Kingdom of God may come, "Ad Sanctam Trinitatem per Mariam, Ut adveniat Regnum Deum, adveniat Regnum Mariae, ergo TOTUS TUUS ego sum, MARIA" See http://www.maria-domina-animarum.net/en/flowers/1-250

Mary, our Heavenly Mother, implores those who receive Holy Communion Daily, or at least Weekly, to Offer their Lives. TEXT OF THE LIFE OFFERING, adapted and pluralized: Dear Lord Jesus, before the Holy Trinity, Our Heavenly Mother, and the whole Heavenly Court, united with Your most Precious Blood and Your Sacrifice on Calvary, We hereby Offer our whole Lives to the Intention of Your Sacred Heart and to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. Together with our life, we place at Your disposal all Holy Masses, all our Holy Communions, all Rosaries, all acts of consecration, all our good deeds, all our sacrifices, and the suffering of our entire life for the Adoration and Supplication of the Holy Trinity, for Unity in our Holy Mother Church, for the Holy Father, Pope Francis the First; and for His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI. For all the Cardinals of the Holy Roman Church, for all Bishops of the Universal Church that they may be true Apostles and Shepherds; and for Priests, Nuns and Monks, for good Priestly and Religious Vocations, and for All Souls until the end of the world. O my Jesus, please accept our life Sacrifice and our offerings and give us Your grace that we may all persevere obediently until death. Amen." https://marianapostolate.com/life-offering/ It is recommended that you make this Life Offering as soon as you feel ready, and to renew it from time to time. Please do.

Please read the Blessed Mother's amazing promises in the link: A simple effective way for thousands of us to save millions of souls. The Doctors and Apostles say if we save even just one other soul through prayer and sacrifice, we also ensure the salvation of our own. Let us all Offer all our Life to Jesus and Mary Today.

Let's go further and think why Creation Scientists were able so presciently to predict these were fakes and would be falsified one day (see the Creation Science textbook from the 1920s cited earlier on the "Piltdown man" evolutionist fraud) while their relatively less enlightened evolutionist peers were not and ended up being duped. It comes down to fossil record problems and manifest lack of intermediates. http://www.creationscience.com/onlinebook/ReferencesandNotes22.html#wp1012863 if apes really turned into men, there would be millions of "ape-men", not a few rare and dubious apes or frauds from modern man.

"23. Fossil Gaps

If evolution happened, the fossil record should show continuous and gradual changes from the bottom to the top layers. Actually, many gaps or discontinuities appear throughout the fossil record.a At the most fundamental level, a big gap exists between forms of life whose cells have nuclei (eukaryotes, such as plants, animals, and fungi) and those that don’t (prokaryotes, such as bacteria and blue-green algae).b Fossil links are also missing between large groupings of plants,c between single-celled forms of life and invertebrates (animals without backbones), among insects,d between invertebrates and vertebrates (animals with backbones),e between fish and amphibians,f between amphibians and reptiles,g between reptiles and mammals,h between reptiles and birds,i between primates and other mammals,j and between apes and other primates.k In fact, chains are missing, not links. The fossil record has been studied so thoroughly that it is safe to conclude that these gaps are real; they will never be filled.l

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a . “But, as by this theory innumerable transitional forms must have existed, why do we not find them imbedded in countless numbers in the crust of the earth?” Darwin, The Origin of Species, p. 163.

“... the number of intermediate varieties, which have formerly existed [must] truly be enormous. Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely-graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and serious objection which can be urged against the theory [of evolution].” Ibid., p. 323.

Darwin then explained that he thought that these gaps existed because of the “imperfection of the geologic record.” Early Darwinians expected the gaps would be filled as fossil exploration continued. Most paleontologists now agree that this expectation has not been fulfilled.

u The Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago has one of the largest collections of fossils in the world. Consequently, its former dean, Dr. David Raup, was highly qualified to discuss the absence of transitions in the fossil record.

Well, we are now about 120 years after Darwin and the knowledge of the fossil record has been greatly expanded. We now have a quarter of a million fossil species but the situation hasn’t changed much. The record of evolution is still surprisingly jerky and, ironically, we have even fewer examples of evolutionary transition than we had in Darwin’s time. By this I mean that some of the classic cases of darwinian change in the fossil record, such as the evolution of the horse in North America, have had to be discarded or modified as a result of more detailed information—what appeared to be a nice simple progression when relatively few data were available now appears to be much more complex and much less gradualistic. So Darwin’s problem has not been alleviated in the last 120 years and we still have a record which does show change but one that can hardly be looked upon as the most reasonable consequence of natural selection. David M. Raup, “Conflicts Between Darwin and Paleontology,” Field Museum of Natural History Bulletin, Vol. 50, January 1979, p. 25.

u “Surely the lack of gradualism—the lack of intermediates—is a major problem.” Dr. David Raup, as taken from page 16 of an approved and verified transcript of a taped interview conducted by Luther D. Sunderland on 27 July 1979.

u “In fact, the fossil record does not convincingly document a single transition from one species to another.” Stanley, p. 95.

u “But fossil species remain unchanged throughout most of their history and the record fails to contain a single example of a significant transition.” David S. Woodruff, “Evolution: The Paleobiological View,” Science, Vol. 208, 16 May 1980, p. 716.

I fully agree with your comments on the lack of direct illustration of evolutionary transitions in my book. If I knew of any, fossil or living, I would certainly have included them. You suggest that an artist should be asked to visualise such transformations, but where would he get the information from? I could not, honestly, provide it, and if I were to leave it to artistic licence, would that not mislead the reader? ... Yet Gould and the American Museum people are hard to contradict when they say that there are no transitional fossils. As a palaeontologist myself, I am much occupied with the philosophical problems of identifying ancestral forms in the fossil record. You say that I should at least “show a photo of the fossil from which each type organism was derived.” I will lay it on the line—there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument. Copy of letter, dated 10 April 1979, from Patterson to Sunderland.

u “But the curious thing is that there is a consistency about the fossil gaps: the fossils go missing in all the important places. When you look for links between major groups of animals, they simply aren’t there; at least, not in enough numbers to put their status beyond doubt. Either they don’t exist at all, or they are so rare that endless argument goes on about whether a particular fossil is, or isn’t, or might be, transitional between this group or that.” [emphasis in original] Hitching, p. 19.

u “There is no more conclusive refutation of Darwinism than that furnished by palaeontology. Simple probability indicates that fossil hoards can only be test samples. Each sample, then, should represent a different stage of evolution, and there ought to be merely ‘transitional’ types, no definition and no species. Instead of this we find perfectly stable and unaltered forms persevering through long ages, forms that have not developed themselves on the fitness principle, but appear suddenly and at once in their definitive shape; that do not thereafter evolve towards better adaptation, but become rarer and finally disappear, while quite different forms crop up again. What unfolds itself, in ever-increasing richness of form, is the great classes and kinds of living beings which exist aboriginally and exist still, without transition types, in the grouping of today.” [emphasis in original] Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, Vol. 2 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966), p. 32.

u “This regular absence of transitional forms is not confined to mammals, but is an almost universal phenomenon, as has long been noted by paleontologists. It is true of almost all orders of all classes of animals, both vertebrate and invertebrate. A fortiori, it is also true of the classes, themselves, and of the major animal phyla, and it is apparently also true of analogous categories of plants.” George Gaylord Simpson, Tempo and Mode in Evolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1944), p. 107.

“... the geologic record did not then and still does not yield a finely graduated chain of slow and progressive evolution. In other words, there are not enough intermediates. There are very few cases where one can find a gradual transition from one species to another and very few cases where one can look at a part of the fossil record and actually see that organisms were improving in the sense of becoming better adapted.” Ibid., p. 23.

u “... there are about 25 major living subdivisions (phyla) of the animal kingdom alone, all with gaps between them that are not bridged by known intermediates.” Francisco J. Ayala and James W. Valentine, Evolving, The Theory and Processes of Organic Evolution (Menlo Park, California: The Benjamin Cummings Publishing Co., 1979), p. 258.

u “All paleontologists know that the fossil record contains precious little in the way of intermediate forms; transitions between major groups are characteristically abrupt.” Gould, “The Return of Hopeful Monsters,” p. 23.

u “The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology. The evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches; the rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of fossils. ... We fancy ourselves as the only true students of life’s history, yet to preserve our favored account of evolution by natural selection we view our data as so bad that we never see the very process we profess to study.” Stephen Jay Gould, “Evolution’s Erratic Pace,” Natural History, Vol. 86, May 1977, p. 14.

“New species almost always appeared suddenly in the fossil record with no intermediate links to ancestors in older rocks of the same region.” Ibid., p. 12.

u “The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualistic accounts of evolution.” Stephen Jay Gould, “Is a New and General Theory of Evolution Emerging?” Paleobiology, Vol. 6, No. 1, 1980, p. 127.

u In a published interview, Dr. Niles Eldredge, an invertebrate paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History, stated:

But the smooth transition from one form of life to another which is implied in the theory is ... not borne out by the facts. The search for “missing links” between various living creatures, like humans and apes, is probably fruitless ... because they probably never existed as distinct transitional types ... But no one has yet found any evidence of such transitional creatures. This oddity has been attributed to gaps in the fossil record which gradualists expected to fill when rock strata of the proper age had been found. In the last decade, however, geologists have found rock layers of all divisions of the last 500 million years and no transitional forms were contained in them. If it is not the fossil record which is incomplete then it must be the theory. “Missing, Believed Nonexistent,” Manchester Guardian (The Washington Post Weekly), Vol. 119, 26 November 1978, p. 1.

Gould and Eldredge claimed transitional fossils are missing because rapid evolutionary jumps (which they called punctuated equilibria) occurred over these gaps. They did not explain how this could happen.

Many geneticists are shocked by the proposal of Gould and Eldredge. Why would they propose something so contradictory to genetics? Gould and Eldredge were forced to say that evolution must proceed in jumps. Never explained, in genetic and mathematical terms, is how such large jumps could occur. To some, this desperation is justified.

u “Despite the bright promise that paleontology provides a means of ‘seeing’ evolution, it has presented some nasty difficulties for evolutionists the most notorious of which is the presence of ‘gaps’ in the fossil record. Evolution requires intermediate forms between species and paleontology does not provide them.” David B. Kitts (School of Geology and Geophysics, University of Oklahoma), “Paleontology and Evolutionary Theory,” Evolution, Vol. 28, September 1974, p. 467.

u “In spite of the immense amount of the paleontological material and the existence of long series of intact stratigraphic sequences with perfect records for the lower categories, transitions between the higher categories are missing.” Goldschmidt, p. 98.

“When a new phylum, class, or order appears, there follows a quick, explosive (in terms of geological time) diversification so that practically all orders or families known appear suddenly and without any apparent transitions.” Ibid., p. 97.

u “There is no fossil record establishing historical continuity of structure for most characters that might be used to assess relationships among phyla.” Katherine G. Field et al., “Molecular Phylogeny of the Animal Kingdom,” Science, Vol. 239, 12 February 1988, p. 748.

b . “The prokaryotes came first; eukaryotes (all plants, animals, fungi and protists) evolved from them, and to this day biologists hotly debate how this transition took place, with about 20 different theories on the go. ... [What was thought to be an intermediate between prokaryotes and eukaryotes] is no longer tenable.” Katrin Henze and William Martin, “Essence of Mitochondria,” Nature, Vol. 426, 13 November 2003, p. 127.

c . If evolution happened, nonvascular plants should have preceded vascular plants. However, fossils of nonvascular plants are not found in strata evolutionists believe were deposited before the earliest vascular plants appeared.

The bryophytes [nonvascular plants] are presumed to have evolved before the appearance and stabilization of vascular tissue—that is, before the appearance of these tracheophytes [vascular plants]—although there is no early bryophyte [nonvascular plant] fossil record. Lynn Margulis and Karlene V. Schwartz, p. 250.

“The actual steps that led to the origin of seeds and fruits are not known ...” Ibid.

u “It has long been hoped that extinct plants will ultimately reveal some of the stages through which existing groups have passed during the course of their development, but it must be freely admitted that this aspiration has been fulfilled to a very slight extent, even though paleobotanical research has been in progress for more than one hundred years. As yet we have not been able to trace the phylogenetic history of a single group of modern plants from its beginning to the present.” Chester A. Arnold, An Introduction to Paleobotany (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1947), p. 7.

u “... to the unprejudiced, the fossil record of plants is in favour of special creation. If, however, another explanation could be found for this hierarchy of classification, it would be the knell [the death signal] of the theory of evolution. Can you imagine how an orchid, a duckweed, and a palm have come from the same ancestry, and have we any evidence for this assumption? The evolutionist must be prepared with an answer, but I think that most would break down before an inquisition. Textbooks hoodwink.” E. J. H. Corner, “Evolution,” Contemporary Botanical Thought, editors Anna M. MacLeod and L. S. Cobley (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1961), p. 97.

u “The absence of any known series of such intermediates imposes severe restrictions on morphologists interested in the ancestral source of angiosperms [flowering plants] and leads to speculation and interpretation of homologies and relationships on the basis of the most meager circumstantial evidence.” Charles B. Beck, Origin and Early Evolution of Angiosperms (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), p. 5.

u “The origin of angiosperms, an ‘abominable mystery’ to Charles Darwin, remained so 100 years later and is little better today.” Colin Patterson et al., “Congruence between Molecular and Morphological Phylogenies,” Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, Vol. 24, 1993, p. 170.

e . Speaking of the lack of transitional fossils between the invertebrates and vertebrates, Smith admits:

As our present information stands, however, the gap remains unbridged, and the best place to start the evolution of the vertebrates is in the imagination. Homer W. Smith, From Fish to Philosopher (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1953), p. 26.

u “How this earliest chordate stock evolved, what stages of development it went through to eventually give rise to truly fishlike creatures we do not know. Between the Cambrian when it probably originated, and the Ordovician when the first fossils of animals with really fishlike characteristics appeared, there is a gap of perhaps 100 million years which we will probably never be able to fill.” Francis Downes Ommanney, The Fishes, Life Nature Library (New York: Time, Inc., 1963), p. 60.

u “Origin of the vertebrates is obscure—there is no fossil record preceding the occurrence of fishes in the late Ordovician time.” Arthur N. Strahler, Science and Earth History: The Evolution/Creation Controversy (Buffalo, New York: Prometheus Books, 1987), p. 316.

u “The problem is easily stated—vertebrates have so many special features, from large brains to complex physiologies to unique tissues such as enamel and bone—that their evolution from invertebrates is obscure.” Henry Gee, “Origin and Evolution of Vertebrates,” Nature, Vol. 520, 23 April 2015, p. 449.

f . “... there are no intermediate forms between finned and limbed creatures in the fossil collections of the world.” Taylor, p. 60.

g . Evolutionists believe that amphibians evolved into reptiles, with either Diadectes or Seymouria as the transition. By the evolutionists’ own time scale, this “transition” occurs 35-million years (m.y.) after the earliest reptile, Hylonomus (a cotylosaur). A parent cannot appear 35-million years after its child! The scattered locations of these fossils also present problems for evolutionists.

Please listen to the frequent messages and take heed of the directions given from Our Living Lord and Our Loving Lady from around the world here: https://maryrefugeofholylove.com/ Great things are at stake. Please consecrate your life to the Blessed Mother so that the Kingdom of God may come, "Ad Sanctam Trinitatem per Mariam, Ut adveniat Regnum Deum, adveniat Regnum Mariae, ergo TOTUS TUUS ego sum, MARIA" See http://www.maria-domina-animarum.net/en/flowers/1-250

Mary, our Heavenly Mother, implores those who receive Holy Communion Daily, or at least Weekly, to Offer their Lives. TEXT OF THE LIFE OFFERING, adapted and pluralized: Dear Lord Jesus, before the Holy Trinity, Our Heavenly Mother, and the whole Heavenly Court, united with Your most Precious Blood and Your Sacrifice on Calvary, We hereby Offer our whole Lives to the Intention of Your Sacred Heart and to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. Together with our life, we place at Your disposal all Holy Masses, all our Holy Communions, all Rosaries, all acts of consecration, all our good deeds, all our sacrifices, and the suffering of our entire life for the Adoration and Supplication of the Holy Trinity, for Unity in our Holy Mother Church, for the Holy Father, Pope Francis the First; and for His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI. For all the Cardinals of the Holy Roman Church, for all Bishops of the Universal Church that they may be true Apostles and Shepherds; and for Priests, Nuns and Monks, for good Priestly and Religious Vocations, and for All Souls until the end of the world. O my Jesus, please accept our life Sacrifice and our offerings and give us Your grace that we may all persevere obediently until death. Amen." https://marianapostolate.com/life-offering/ It is recommended that you make this Life Offering as soon as you feel ready, and to renew it from time to time. Please do.

Please read the Blessed Mother's amazing promises in the link: A simple effective way for thousands of us to save millions of souls. The Doctors and Apostles say if we save even just one other soul through prayer and sacrifice, we also ensure the salvation of our own. Let us all Offer all our Life to Jesus and Mary Today.

Can those who believe even in apes-to-men evolution explain how these things can be? If not, can anyone deny man had to be specially created?

"27. Fossil Man

Bones of modern-looking humans have been found deep in undisturbed rocks that, according to evolution, were formed long before man began to evolve. Examples include the Castenedolo skeletons,a Reck’s skeleton,b and possibly others.c Remains, such as the Swanscombe skull, the Steinheim fossil, and the Vertesszöllos fossil present similar problems.d Evolutionists almost always ignore these remains."

As the student of prehistoric man reads and studies the records of the “Castenedolo” find, a feeling of incredulity rises within him. He cannot reject the discovery as false without doing an injury to his sense of truth, and he cannot accept it as a fact without shattering his accepted beliefs. Arthur Keith, The Antiquity of Man (London: Williams and Norgate, Ltd., 1925), p. 334.

However, after examining the strata above and below the Castenedolo skeletons, and after finding no indication that they were intrusively buried, Keith surprisingly concluded that the enigma must be resolved by an intrusive burial. He justified this by citing the unfossilized condition of the bones. However, these bones were encased in a clay layer. Clay would prevent water from transporting large amounts of dissolved minerals into the bone cells and explain the lack of fossilization. Again, fossilization depends much more on chemistry than age.

u Cousins and Whitney state that the Calaveras skull was fossilized. This does not mean that it was preflood. Fossilization depends on chemistry much more than time.

For many years, a story circulated that the Calaveras skull, buried 130 feet below ground, was a practical joke. This tidy explanation conveniently overlooks hundreds of human bones and artifacts (such as spearheads, mortars and pestles, and dozens of bowls made of stone) found in that part of California. These artifacts have been found over the years under undisturbed strata and a layer of basaltic lava that evolutionists would date at 25-million years old—too old to be human. See, for example:

Please listen to the frequent messages and take heed of the directions given from Our Living Lord and Our Loving Lady from around the world here: https://maryrefugeofholylove.com/ Great things are at stake. Please consecrate your life to the Blessed Mother so that the Kingdom of God may come, "Ad Sanctam Trinitatem per Mariam, Ut adveniat Regnum Deum, adveniat Regnum Mariae, ergo TOTUS TUUS ego sum, MARIA" See http://www.maria-domina-animarum.net/en/flowers/1-250

Mary, our Heavenly Mother, implores those who receive Holy Communion Daily, or at least Weekly, to Offer their Lives. TEXT OF THE LIFE OFFERING, adapted and pluralized: Dear Lord Jesus, before the Holy Trinity, Our Heavenly Mother, and the whole Heavenly Court, united with Your most Precious Blood and Your Sacrifice on Calvary, We hereby Offer our whole Lives to the Intention of Your Sacred Heart and to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. Together with our life, we place at Your disposal all Holy Masses, all our Holy Communions, all Rosaries, all acts of consecration, all our good deeds, all our sacrifices, and the suffering of our entire life for the Adoration and Supplication of the Holy Trinity, for Unity in our Holy Mother Church, for the Holy Father, Pope Francis the First; and for His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI. For all the Cardinals of the Holy Roman Church, for all Bishops of the Universal Church that they may be true Apostles and Shepherds; and for Priests, Nuns and Monks, for good Priestly and Religious Vocations, and for All Souls until the end of the world. O my Jesus, please accept our life Sacrifice and our offerings and give us Your grace that we may all persevere obediently until death. Amen." https://marianapostolate.com/life-offering/ It is recommended that you make this Life Offering as soon as you feel ready, and to renew it from time to time. Please do.

Please read the Blessed Mother's amazing promises in the link: A simple effective way for thousands of us to save millions of souls. The Doctors and Apostles say if we save even just one other soul through prayer and sacrifice, we also ensure the salvation of our own. Let us all Offer all our Life to Jesus and Mary Today.